National Institutes of Health SMaHT Grant

It is exciting to announce our project was presented as part of a new National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Fund program called the Somatic Mosaicism across Human Tissues (SMaHT) Network. Baylor College of Medicine received the grant to develop state-of-the-art tools to catalog the extent of somatic mosaicism in different cell types, tissues and life stages, to better understand how much somatic mosaicism influences human biology and disease.

With the grant, Baylor will establish a genome characterization center at Baylor’s Human Genome Sequencing Center. Dr. Rui Chen will serve as co-principal investigator of the project, along with Dr. Richard Gibbs, founding director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center and Dr. Harsha Doddapaneni, associate professor at the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor. The center will characterize somatic variation in 550 of the SMaHT program’s 2,250 tissue samples. Sample tissues will come from approximately 150 human donors from diverse ancestry backgrounds and stages of life and will represent different tissue types, including brain, blood, skin, muscle, colon, spleen, uterus, vas deferens, ovaries and testis.

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